Post navigation

THE SEX FIEND AND THE DAMAGE DONE…

One of the questions that’s been swirling around the Harvey Weinstein revelations is why, after all these years, his enablers at places like the New York Times suddenly turned on him. (The notion that they were scared of being scooped by The New Yorker, the weekly which had decided to run with Ronan Farrow’s piece here seems a little thin on the ground, as does the notion that he had become too “pro-Israel.” But I confess I haven’t heard anything better, at least not anywhere but my own head.)

My best guess is that Weinstein is a sacrificial lamb, something Hollywood has been good at since the Fatty Arbuckle days,** and modern day Wall Street has turned into an art form (see Michael Milken, Jordan Beltran, Bernie Madoff). He’ll now be the poster boy for all the things a corrupt system surely doesn’t do anymore because it has learned the profit-margin-eating error of its ways (“Look what happened to that guy! We wouldn’t dare do such a thing again!”), while said system rolls merrily along.

We’ll see.

My bigger interest right now is in looking into what Weinstein and his ilk have cost the culture.

This is not to diminish the personal damage done to the lives and careers of the many women–most of them not famous–he molested in one form or other, likely up to and including rape. Of course, for them, any damage to the rest of us is secondary and rightly so.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t all have a stake.

I confess my take was sharpened by just having watched The Paperboy, a southern potboiler (I ordered it because I’m trying to work up a post about Florida movies…might be a month or two as I have some holes to fill), which features Nicole Kidman in a Nympho Southern Belle role that’s very similar to Rosanna Arquette’s brilliant turn in The Wrong Man.

Kidman’s a fine actress, of course, and she catches the outre aspect of the character expertly. But she misses the barely disguised vulnerability. The script allows her to reach for it and she does…she just doesn’t quite grasp it. So it’s sad what happens to her (she dies) but not as sad as what happens to Arquette in The Wrong Man (where she has to watch her meal ticket die while his possible replacement is riding down the track on a train that’s already going too fast for him to jump off).

So, the only time these two played on the same turf, Arquette won and it wasn’t even close.

But Kidman is the much bigger star and the far more “respected” actress. I don’t say she didn’t earn those things. Oh no, far from it. You can’t fake talent. But what the Weinstein revelations have called into question is just how tilted a never-very-level playing field was to begin with.

Not as much of a price as Rose McGowan, who has basically quit acting. But more of a price than Gwyneth Paltrow or Angelina Jolie (and I’m not saying the price they paid was small, just that they didn’t have their careers entirely derailed).

I note here the pecking order, of which Harvey Weinstein and all similar minded Hollywood big shots were keenly aware. Paltrow is the daughter of a famous producer/director and an even more famous award-winning actress. Jolie is the daughter of Oscar winner Jon Voight. Arquette is the daughter of two moderately successful actors who are more famous for their children than themselves but nonetheless, like Mira Sorvino, who has also come forward, “of the community.”

Many others have come forward. But studying just these five–plus the even harsher fates of those lesser known, many of whom were driven out of the business–one can detect a pattern.

The more connected you were, the more likelihood Weinstein would forget and forgive if you turned him down.

The way you were defined as “connected” was if a) you were born into the club; or b) you were already a big star (which, for instance, Nicole Kidman was by the time she started working with him on a regular basis). In the case of the latter, it was likely you would be spared Weinstein’s bathrobe and potted plant routine, as Kidman, Meryl Streep and others of similar stature evidently were.

Again, what happened to them is between them and Weinstein and I don’t care if they choose to put it all behind them with a PR statement or send someone to put a horse head in his bed. They’re all quite capable of managing their own affairs without advice from me.

But I can’t help wondering how much all this cost–and, if I’m right about the transient nature of the outrage, will continue to cost–the world at large.

Any given generation only produces so much talent. We have trouble accepting this in our current State of Industrialized Egalitarianism, but it’s as true now as ever, and as true for actresses as any other group of artists.

The element that binds every single one of those who have accused Weinstein of harassing them and, either by threat or implication, making them fear for their careers, is that none of them ever reached their full potential. (Streep and Kidman have…but they were never threatened. And, to be clear, I have no respect for Streep or anyone else who stood up for the self-confessed-and-proud-of-it statutory rapist Roman Polanski over the years. Hollywood has earned its reputation for shameless hypocrisy, but that’s not the topic of this post.)

And just from those who were attacked by Harvey Weinstein, who exactly no one thinks was a lone wolf.

Even by itself, that’s a gaping hole blown in a generation’s worth of top tier talent.

You can multiply it exponentially by adding the “chill” effect.

To all the jobs they were never considered for because Harvey Weinstein–the principal taste-maker of the age–either wouldn’t hire them, or would only accept them in minor parts (like Arquette’s scene-stealing cameo in Weinstein favorite Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a movie that, IMHO would have earned its rep if Arquette and Uma Thurman had merely switched places–and if Tarantino never let this occur to him because he knew how Harvey felt, then he’s even more of what I’ve always said he is: a coward), add all the roles they were never considered for by like-minded thugs because of the, Hey,isn’t she the one who turned Harvey down? factor. (In case Harvey wasn’t prone to talking about the ones who turned him down–some thugs do, some thugs don’e–all they had to do was look at who he wasn’t hiring.)

And then add in how many times they weren’t even considered for the next good part because they didn’t get the last one.

And then keep on adding all the factors we can’t even see. Maybe, for instance, the psychological damage done even to a reasonably secure Child of Hollywood like Gwyneth Paltrow, who has–for whatever reason–devoted much of her adult life to things she probably never dreamed of doing when she was putting in the hard, humbling yards required to be a go-to actress, the kind of trial-by-fire you could be forgiven believing one would only go through if coming out the other side was as important as breathing.

How many good or great movies did she–or any of the others–simply decide not to do because they didn’t want to deal with the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, knowing that, even if his sins ever did come to light, the first question asked would be why they didn’t out him sooner?

If, that is, they were among the few who decided it was worth coming forward at last, even if they knew that question was coming.

I’ll buy that Weinstein’s carefully chosen political beliefs bought him decades of cover. I’ll even suggest that he chose those “beliefs” for that very reason, or, at very least, chose to quell any doubts he might have had about those beliefs in order to get on with the pursuit of thuggery which is bound to be the only aspect of life that really excites a thug.

But you can bet there are others–perhaps many others–who are out there right now, lying low for the moment, holding their breath, cozying up to those very same Editors and Publishers, winking and nodding, waiting for the heat to die down.

So they can start on the next generation.

**Silent star Arbuckle was accused of murder in Hollywood’s first really earthshaking scandal. It was probably a pure scapegoating job. He was tried three times. The first two were hung juries. The third jury acquitted him and offered him a written apology for his ordeal. His career was ruined, however, and his reputation sufficiently blackened that, nearly a century later, one has to provide explanatory footnotes. His actual case is not comparable to Weinstein’s. The means to which the respective cases were/are put to use, likely will be.

Exactly. How many times did an actress (or in some cases a male actor, especially a pre-adult) just go “uh oh” and shut down inside? Not even go there? It’s likely even those affected don’t really know everything in this respect. I imagine the ripples are endless.

It does offer a potential answer to a question I’ve had about so many actresses in the last twenty, thirty years including several mentioned here. “She was so great in Such and Such….Why isn’t she ACTING?”

Johnny, you are an old-world gentleman in some ways. You may not see that some of the invitations come from the “victim”. I saw people, women, mothers…offer and do things for just the fantasy of some kind of chance. It was perhaps all of 3 seconds in their own mind of a blindingly bright career and future.
Or even just a roll with an old, ugly dude and you never did present a bill because you felt sorry for him.
True human behavior, unlike scandal, is frequently mundane in the objective tense.

Well I didn’t want to complicate the piece further by getting into however many women went along willingly…which, as you suggest, might be a high percentage of those lacking in the talent department. And, of course, the casting couch (in some form or other) is much older than Hollywood itself and plenty have thrown themselves on it willingly. But since he was caught on tape, there’s not much doubt old Harvey’s a thug who used his power in nasty ways…and there’s plenty to suggest that it was his interest in the delights of thuggery that drove his famous “taste” rather than the other way around.
And I’m enough of an old world gentleman that I probably should have also mentioned the irony in “Liberal” Hollywood being made, shall we say, uncomfortable, by a slight twist on the very depravity they’ve promoted 24/7 since the 70s.

Speaking of old world gentlemanliness, my dad (who really was born in another world), gave me exactly two pieces of advice regarding relations with women: “Don’t ever be alone in a room with the door closed with any woman you don’t completely trust.” and “Women have regrets.”

I’m guessing old Harvey had a very different set of values imparted to him.

There once was the adult bourn where adolescents no longer dream of traveling. It was there in that electric atmosphere that the element of risk when a man and woman met was hotly expected.

Or at least hoped for.

Even though it was disappointing 99% of the time it held us. New chains for old. That this dangerously freeing dance at a fork in the road is now understood by some to be the path to destruction—and salvation a crusade making it law that you must first get a note from Mommy—or your Supervisor—before even daring to give place to a moment’s impulse or invitation.

Well there will definitely never be a better time….(What I always remember is Cosby’s best friend, Robert Culp, who died before all these allegations became common knowledge, describing him as the angriest man he ever met….but I’m always up for a good conspiracy theory!)